Eastern Oklahoma Catholic July/August 2012 : Page 3
from the bishop To be created in the image and likeness of God is to believe our existence has pur-pose. We are made by Someone and for something. The Someone is God who has created us to be in union with Him (the purpose of our creation, the “something” we spoke of here.) God wants us to know and love Him. All our life, we have to learn how to use our free will in the way in which God intended, and repent of the times when we freely choose to go against the will of God. The gift of life is not sim-ply an empty box into which we can place any of our desires or urges and then label it “the will of God.” Free will, that is our power to choose, ought to be used in such a way that re-flects the purposes for which God has created us. When we use our free will in this way, in order to seek that which is objectively true, then we experience true freedom. “You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:32) This is the lesson we learn when we see parents teaching their children to tell the truth. We explain as carefully as we can that lies ensnare us and take away our freedom; while telling the truth guards our freedom. Dishonesty damages us and makes it impossible to attain that purpose for which God created us. One of the lessons of life we hand down to our children is that they should choose to make the free choices that reflect the purposes for which God has created us – those choices regarding themselves and their relationships. as I have loved you.” (John 13:34) But there are so many uses of the word “love” in our society, how can we know what Jesus meant? Often we confuse the act of love with desire and emotional attachment, so that when we say, “I love you” we want to indicate the affection we feel, rather than our decision to act in sacrifice. in a real sense, made for one another. It is as a pair that they are called to deepen their relationship to God through exer-cise of their free will, choosing to live in obedience, both Adam and Eve sacrificing of themselves to encourage the other to choose God’s will instead of their own. Instead, as we know, they misused their free will to seek what they wanted rather than what God intended. They lost their freedom and the self-sacrifice required to love became onerous to the point of impossibility. Their sin would ultimately require an act of love, a gift of self so perfect, that it would restore us, allowing us to recover our true relations with one another and reconcile us to God. For this reason, St. Paul refers to Jesus as the sec-ond Adam, whose sacrifice on the cross restores our freedom. “For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also came through a man.” (1 Corinthians 15:21, also Romans 5:12) “God created man in His image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:17) Love is an act of self-giving and if you are absolutely honest in exploring it, the emotions and feelings we have actually follow our decision to act and are not the motivation for the sacrifice. When we are willing to give of ourselves in the full freedom of our humanity, the emotions follow. But if we act only on the emotions, we find our affections unable to motivate the level of self-giving love requires. The early Church used the Greek word agape to describe the essence of this love. Agape is that sacrificial act of giving your-self to another person without the expec-tation that the gift will be reciprocated. We give because self-sacrifice opens us up to love, and, in loving, we find the path to being most fully human, not because we expect that someone will give to us. A mother, for example, doesn’t feed her in-fant because she expects her infant to feed her in return. She gives from the heart, sacrificing herself over and over, without the thought of recompense, but hoping only to teach her child the meaning of sacrificial love so that he or she might be-come the person whom God intends. In Christian tradition, the love of God is often expressed using the image of a husband and a wife. Isaiah the prophet calls Israel the wife of the Lord God and St. Paul invokes this same image when he writes both about the Church in Corinth: “For I am jealous of you with the jealousy of God, since I betrothed you to one husband to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.” (2 Corinthians 11:2) , and when he writes about the mutual responsibili-ties of husbands and wives: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church.” (Ephesians 5:25-30) Next month, when we continue this dis-cussion, I will address why all that we have spoken about above is missing in pretend marriages. To be free is to use our free will correctly To have freedom is to live as God cre-ated us. If we use our ability to choose, what we call our “free will,” in such a way that we choose what we want, as op-posed to what God intends, then we start on a path of self-destruction marked by alienation and loneliness, which may be-come so pervasive that we cannot escape it. Alienation and loneliness, rather than freedom and self-actualization, become the characteristics of our lives. Tempted in the Garden, Jesus prays to His Father and points the way to us: “Not my will, but thine be done.” (Matthew 26:39) At the core of our freedom is Christ’s commandment to love: “Love one another Self-sacrificing love as the basis of marriage It is this kind of self-sacrificing love that defines marriage. We see this in Gen-esis. Adam and Eve reflect who we are in relationship to each other and to God. Created to be individual persons, and yet incomplete without the other, they are, Bishop Edward J. Slattery 3
Publication List
Using a screen reader? Click Here